We are back again with the latest edition of Whewell’s Gazette your weekly #histSTM links list bringing you once again all the histories of science, technology and medicine that we could vacuum up out of cyberspace over the last seven days.

We are just five and a half weeks into the year and it’s already time to wish you a lucky New Year once again as 8 February is New Years Day on the Chinese lunar calendar. Like the Christian Easter the Chinese New Year is a movable feast falling on the first new moon following the 21 January. It is also known as the Spring Festival. Monday marks the beginning of the Year of the Monkey in the Chinese twelve-year cycle and year 4714, 4713 or 4653 depending on which system of counting you adhere to. It is also New Year in a large number of other Asian countries.

All of this just highlights how arbitrary our calendar systems are and to warn you to gear up for the Persian New Year that falls on 20 March this year, that’s in six weeks!

Quotes of the week:

“The west was not settled by men and women who had taken courses in ‘How to be a pioneer.'” – Unknown h/t @JohnDCook

“Atheists believe in a God who does not exist“. – @fadesingh

Source: AsapSCIENCE

“what idiot called them communion wafers and not Corpus Crispies” – John Gallagher (@earlymodernjohn)

Birthday of the Week:

Clyde Tombaugh born 4 February 1906

Clyde W. Tombaugh at his family’s farm with his homemade telescope in 1928, two years before his discovery of Pluto. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

STICK SHIFT (left to right) Glass irrigation syringe with cork stopper and coiled-thread seal, in use until the early twentieth century; large enema syringe from the late nineteenth century; and twentieth-century models with removable needles. The glass and metal one (bottom right) could be disassembled and disinfected for reuse. This killed some pathogens, but it made others more resilient. An increasingly sophisticated understanding of cross-contamination led to the disposable plastic syringe with removable needle (top right), and to the first fully disposable plastic syringe, invented in the 1950s but not used widely until the ’80s.